1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus which allows software installation, a control method for the apparatus, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with the trend toward image forming apparatuses with multiple functions, setting of such image forming apparatuses when they are installed has become complicated. Accordingly, the operation time and the labor cost of the service engineer who performs the setting of the image forming apparatuses are increasing.
As a conventional technique for solving such a problem, there is a method by which firmware and setting data necessary for the operation are delivered to the image forming apparatus via a network so that software can be installed on the image forming apparatus. Further, there is also known a method which uses a removable external storage device such as a universal serial bus (USB) flash memory in place of the network. According to this method, the firmware and the setting data are stored in the removable external storage device in advance. Then, when the external storage device is connected to the image forming apparatus, the firmware and the setting data are transferred to the image forming apparatus and the software installation can be performed.
According to the methods described above, once the external storage device is connected to the image forming apparatus, the software can be freely installed on the image forming apparatus. However, although the installation can be easily performed, a method for managing the result of the installation after the installation of the software has not been established. Thus, as for a service engineer managing a plurality of image forming apparatuses, it is difficult to manage information regarding which apparatus has been updated and which apparatus needs to be updated.
In order to solve such a problem, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2012-190239 discusses a method by which after software is installed via an external storage device, information regarding whether update has been performed is stored in the external storage device. Accordingly, the service engineer can manage the result of the setting operation.
If the service engineer sequentially installs software on a plurality of image forming apparatuses in a parallel manner by using an external storage device, it is convenient if the service engineer can check the progress status of the software installation of each image forming apparatus since the service engineer can efficiently collect the result information. However, a concrete method for checking the progress status of the software installation of the image forming apparatus is not discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2012-190239.